After Alice Read Online Free PDF Page B

Stephen’s and Cynthia’s to each other sounding sincere. She feels a reprieve. She will refuse any subsequent invitations to this house.
    She waits for Cynthia and Justin on the top step, outside the door. The moon has risen and is visible behind the messy twist of pine branches, through the dead pines at the edge of this new subdivision. It is caged in a snarl of broken, dead limbs.
    How has she made this mistake, to return here? But she will draw herself in; she will regroup, rethink. She begins to descend Stephen’s front steps.
    And then, turning to look back for an instant, she slips, her weak ankle, the ankle she has favoured since the winter before, when she had sprained it in Montreal, turning under her, her foot twisting in a sudden, irrevocable wrench and crack.
    She clutches the heavy iron railing and manages to fall on her bottom and not her face. But the pain: waves of it traveling up though her leg, her trunk, and spreading (she can feel it, from the inside) across her face and scalp.
    Stephen’s wife Debbie says “Oh, Auntie!” with what sounds more like exasperation than alarm, and gets a bag of frozen peas from the refrigerator, and Stephen and Cynthia try to haul her to her feet and back into the house. But she will not go back inside; no, no. She is being unreasonable. She is making more trouble. But she will not go. Cynthia wrings her hands; Debbie flutters. She is a dead weight on Stephen; she hears him grunt, feels her own mass press down cruelly on his meat and bone.
    Then more arms are under her, around her: Alex and Justin have moved in to assist Stephen. Under many arms, she is hoisted, supported more evenly. Now she can find her balance, put down her good foot, help support herself.
    She allows herself to be hobbled to the car and sits on the passenger seat, the car door open, the frozen peas burning her instep.
    Beyond the pain, rage. She had not wanted to go to Stephen’s for dinner, but Cynthia had made a fuss. Family , she had said, playing that trump card. Why should it matter? Old guilt, old burdens and omissions. She is captive to them still; they all are. She had given in, against her better judgment, thinking: it is only for one evening. And now she will pay much more than she had bargained for. Stupid, stupid.

BRIDGE
    She has broken one of the bones in her foot: a small bone, called the lateral cuneiform. The emergency-room doctor who sets the bone shows her a diagram. “It’s the bridge of your foot, between your heel and your toes,” he says. “It connects all of these parts and makes them articulate: see? If it were one of these long bones, the phalanges, or one of these little cuboid bones of the heel, we would not worry so much. But with the bridge broken, the foot can do nothing. It must be put in a cast, and it must not bear weight.”
    She will be, she calculates, out of commission for six weeks. The pain, at first, is excruciating, but more so, the thought of being immobile. She is able to hobble around her house with crutches; can even manage the stairs, clutching the railing, hopping. But she can’t drive her car, which has standard transmission. She can’t go out walking along the little lake.
    Stupid. Stupid.
    Cynthia has said: call anytime. But she does not call. She will not be supplicant. She will tough it out.
    She lasts five days.
    Justin calls her. (Cynthia can hear a little, can lip-read, but can’t manage on the phone.) “You must be out of groceries.”
    She is, she admits painfully, nearly out of groceries. And other things, too: toilet paper, reading material. But she will not bother Cynthia, who works such long hours. She can wait until the weekend. She is making things more difficult, she knows, but cannot stop herself from this demurring.
    But no: here is Cynthia, within a couple of hours, with Justin, carrying bags of lettuce and lemons and hothouse tomatoes; steaks and eggs; a loaf of crusty,